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Thursday, April 20, 2017

`Where the Mind Wanders To'

The
twenty children came from Poland, France, Yugoslavia, Italy and the Netherlands.
They ranged in age from five to twelve. All were Jewish and had been held in Auschwitz
until they were selected by Josef Mengele for transport to the Neuengamme
concentration camp near Hamburg.

SS-Hauptsturmführer Kurt Heissmeyer, a
physician, wished to test a theory. He intended to prove that the injection of live
tuberculosis bacilli into subjects would serve as a vaccine, a hypothesis
discredited years before. Heissmeyer also believed that if he could immunize Jews,
who were naturally weaker and less disease-resistant than Aryans, his theory
would be further substantiated. Heissmeyer began experimenting on adult
subjects in Neuengamme in June 1944. He infected some one-hundred camp inmates,
observed them for a month and hanged them in preparation for their autopsies.

In
spring 1945, the twenty children from Auschwitz were transferred to Neuengamme,
where they were given subcutaneous injections of tubercle bacteria. All became
ill. After a month, Heissmeyer, who was not a surgeon, ordered a Czech inmate
surgeon to perform lymph node dissections on the children. As Patton’s Third
Army advanced into Germany, the children were taken from Neuengamme to a school
on Bullenhuser Damm in the Rothenburgsort district of Hamburg. On the evening
of April 20, 1945, their physicians and caretakers were hanged in the former
school’s basement, and then each child was injected with morphine and hanged
from a hook in the wall. Some were so frail and had lost so much weight, the
guards hugged and pulled down on their bodies until the nooses tightened and they
asphyxiated. Their bodies were cremated the following night in Neuengamme.

Heissmeyer
returned to his home in Magdeburg in East Germany after the war and had a successful
practice as a lung and tuberculosis specialist. His identity was uncovered in
1959, and in 1966 he was sentenced to life in prison. He died the following
year.

The
story of Heissmeyer, his colleagues and the twenty children is systematically documented
in The Murders at Bullenhuser Damm: The
SS Doctor and the Children by the German journalist Günther Schwarberg
(trans. Erna Baber Rosenfeld and Alvin H. Rosenfeld, Indiana University Press,
1984). The final words in Schwarberg’s book are the names, ages and countries
of origin of the twenty children.

Inevitably,
this reader thinks of Anthony Hecht’s “The Book of Yolek” (The Transparent Man, 1990) and its pivotal line:
“No one else knows where the mind wanders to.” The sestina recalls Aug. 5,
1942, when Polish writer-educator Janusz Korczak accompanied two-hundred
children from his Jewish orphanage under Nazi guard, choosing to die with them
two days later in Treblinka.The school in Hamburg where the twenty children were
murdered has been renamed the Janusz Korczak School. Hecht served in the infantry
company that liberated the concentration camp at Flossenbürg, an annex to
Buchenwald.

April
20, 1945, the day the children were murdered, was Adolf Hitler’s fifty-sixth
and final birthday.